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2003 42: 234Business SocietyElizabeth D. Scott and Karen A. Jehn

About Face: How Employee Dishonesty Influences A Stakeholder's Image of an Organization

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10.1177/0007650303253166BUSINESS & SOCIETY / June 2003Scott, Jehn / ABOUT FACE

About Face: How EmployeeDishonesty Influences A Stakeholder’s

Image of an Organization

ELIZABETH D. SCOTTEastern Connecticut State University

KAREN A. JEHNUniversity of Pennsylvania

This article presents a model of employee dishonesty and formation of stake-holders’ images of organizations, which applies theories of moral judgment andattribution. It describes the person-situation interaction effects of characteristicsof employee behavior and of persons making moral judgments on stakeholders’moral judgments, amounts of blame, loci of blame, and images of organizations.Using a situationally based definition of dishonesty, the article examines the ef-fects of the act, the actor, the result, the person affected, and the intent of an em-ployee’s behavior on stakeholders’ images of the organization, as well as the ef-fects of the characteristics of the person making the moral judgment. Thesituationally based definition of dishonesty provides a theoretical basis for under-standing how differences in situations lead to differences in moral judgments bythe same individuals. The person making the moral judgment is presented as a partof the model to explain how differences in viewpoints result in different moralevaluations of the same situations by different judges. Research directions areidentified and discussed.

Keywords: employee behavior; stakeholder; organizational image

Obviously, there are numerous employee behaviors that potentially affectstakeholders’ images of organizations. We have selected employee dis-honesty as the behavior to examine for the following reasons: (a) it exists

234

AUTHORS’NOTE We thank the Zicklin Center for Business Ethics Research for finan-cial support, and Diana Robertson, Linda Treviño, Lorna Doucet, Craig Dunn, Bill Ross,

BUSINESS & SOCIETY, Vol. 42 No. 2, June 2003 234-266DOI: 10.1177/0007650303253166© 2003 Sage Publications

in all industries in a broad variety of forms (Murphy, 1993), (b) it can besimultaneously encouraged (Hochschild, 1983) and discouraged(Murphy, 1993) by employers, (c) it is generally agreed to be immoral(Scott, 2000; Scott & Jehn, 1999), (d) the lay observer has the ability toform opinions about employee dishonesty (Ekman, 1992), (e) it is oftendirectly stated as a component of stakeholders’ images of organizations(Fombrun, 1996), and (f) it is used as a technique in “managing” image(Schlenker, 1980; Sigmon & Snyder, 1993).

The initial reaction to our topic is often “of course, employee dishon-esty reflects poorly on an organization.” Then, as we discuss various situa-tions, people realize that in many instances, they do not blame the organi-zation for an individual employee’s behavior or they actually praise theemployee for not telling the truth. People involved in organizationalevents vary among themselves and their interpretations of the event; thatis, their view changes from one situation to the next, as our students or theothers we mention previously often notice. In addition, people vary acrossthe same situation; that is, one person’s view is not necessarily the same asanother’s. This variation in assessment by people involved in the sameevent is often related to the people’s various roles in the situation, amountsof knowledge of the facts, previous experience with the organization, orpersonal definitions of what constitutes dishonesty. Past work hasneglected to address this combination of variation in situation and acrosspeople simultaneously (Bone & Corey, 2000). In this article, we present atheory of how employee dishonesty influences a stakeholder’s image of anorganization to explain how these various judgments are made, given vari-ation in the personal characteristics of the people making the judgment, inthe situation surrounding the employee’s behavior, and in the interactionbetween the two.

STAKEHOLDERS’ IMAGES OF ORGANIZATIONS

We are interested in the individual-level, somewhat enduring images oforganizations held by stakeholders. We define stakeholder’s image as arepresentation of the organization in the individual stakeholder’s mind,including both cognitive and emotional dimensions, adapted fromFombrun’s (1996) definition of organizational image (see Gioia, Schultz, &Corley, 2000, for a review of this literature). We see this image as

Scott, Jehn / ABOUT FACE 235

Jane Dutton, Bob Drago, C. B. Bhattacharya, Joan Tomaszewski, and participants at meet-ings of the International Association for Business and Society for their helpful comments onearlier versions of this work. We also thank Haiyi Li for her research assistance.

something more lasting than an impression or a perception, but still able tochange with new information. By “stakeholders,” we mean all individualswho have a present, past, or future interest in the organization. This caninclude current, former, and potential employees, customers, and commu-nity members as well as employees of suppliers, competitors, and otherorganizations that relate to the focal organization. Even though we recog-nize that stakeholders may vary in their importance to an organization, wedo not attempt to distinguish among stakeholders on this basis. Also, werecognize that stakeholders may communicate their images of an organi-zation with other stakeholders, but we do not attempt to model the processby which individuals’ images of organizations merge to form reputations.However, in recognition of the fact that multiple stakeholders may beaware of the same event, yet view it differently, we develop a model that issufficiently broad to make predictions for all human1 stakeholders, notjust members of certain classes of stakeholders.

IMPORTANCE OF IMAGE TOORGANIZATIONAL OUTCOMES

The images stakeholders have of organizations have implications fororganizational performance, which is why organizations often activelyseek to manage their identities and reputations by attempting to place cer-tain images in stakeholders’minds (Bromley, 1993; Caldwell & O’Reilly,1982; Fombrun, 1996). Stakeholders’positive images of organizations areconsidered desirable because they are connected to behaviors that contrib-ute to the organization’s well-being (Boulding, Kalra, Staelin, &Zeithaml, 1993). For example, stakeholders’ images of organizations mayaffect their willingness to do business with them as customers, suppliers,or investors (Fombrun, 1996), or, if the stakeholders are employees, theirproductivity. We propose that the construct of dishonesty perception isespecially important to image because socially undesirable acts have beenshown to have large effects on judgments, such that experimental subjectsare much more likely to make negative attributions in cases involvingsocially undesirable acts (Kanouse & Hanson, 1972) and to cause stake-holders to engage in vendettas, such as those against JP Stephens and theNestle Corporation (Shipp, 1987). Many businesses have been completelydestroyed because of the dishonest behavior of individual employees(Fombrun, 1996), but even small instances of employee dishonesty mayaffect stakeholders’ images of organizations.

236 BUSINESS & SOCIETY / June 2003

FORMATION OF STAKEHOLDERS’IMAGES OF ORGANIZATIONS

Stakeholders’ images of organizations are often not rationally pro-duced (Bromley, 1993). As advertisers know, emotion plays a large role inthe impressions customers have (Poiesz, 1989). And because people typi-cally become angry when discovering lies (Lewicki, 1983), we believethat the emotion dishonesty creates can affect image very strongly. In fact,evidence suggests that attitudes toward organizations are stronglyaffected by the impressions people have of the trustworthiness and hon-esty of the organizations’ advertisements (Kilbourne & Mowen, 1986).What is less clear is how closely people associate the acts of employeeswith the organization as a whole, and thus, how close the connection isbetween employee dishonesty and stakeholders’image of organizations.

We suggest that there is not a direct causal effect such that employeedishonesty → negative image of organization. Instead, there are threeintermediate constructs between the person or situation interaction andthe stakeholder’s image of the organization (see Figure 1). The first is themoral judgment of dishonesty. This is the stakeholder’s view as to whethera particular employee behavior constitutes dishonesty. The second is theamount of blame. This is the stakeholder’s view of how much total blameshould be placed for the behavior, regardless of whether the blame is onthe organization, the employee, or someone or something else. It could beconsidered an assessment of how “bad” the action is. The third is the locusof blame. This is the place (or places) where the stakeholder believesblame should be assigned.

Essentially, we argue that characteristics of the situation and of thestakeholder affect whether the stakeholder believes the employee hasacted dishonestly, how serious the stakeholder believes the offense to be,and who the stakeholder believes should be blamed. Our theory suggeststhat the judgment of dishonesty and the amount of blame act as mediatorsbetween the person or situation interaction and the stakeholder’s image ofthe organization. The locus of blame acts as a moderator to the amount ofblame, which affects how much of the blame is attributed to the organiza-tion. We recognize that stakeholders may partially (or wholly) blame theemployee, the government, themselves, or many others for the dishonestyof an organization’s employee. As people and organizations, besides theemployee’s organization, are blamed, we argue that the effect of theemployee’s behavior on the stakeholder’s image of the organization ismoderated. Figure 1 describes our model. Following, we will discuss inmore detail how each of the links operates. First, we will use theories of


moral judgment to advance propositions as to the judgment of dishonestyand the amount of blame, and then we will use attribution theory toadvance propositions as to the locus of blame.

The “person” side of the model represents the stakeholder who is form-ing an image of the organization, whom we call the “judge.” We use thisterminology to denote one of this stakeholder’s roles in the situation, butwe do not mean to imply that this person is necessarily impartial or playsonly one role. In fact, our model allows for the possibility that the stake-holder who is the judge is also the stakeholder who is the actor or personaffected, or both. Four characteristics of the judge are discussed: (a) moraldevelopment; (b) past behavior, experiences, and beliefs; (c) social cate-gory; and (d) initial image of the organization. We advance propositionsabout the effect of variations in these characteristics on the moral judg-ment about the action, on the amount and locus of blame, and on the stake-holder’s subsequent image of the organization. We discuss several possi-ble interactions between the person and situation, advancing propositionsabout the moderating effects of these interactions.

We begin with the situation side of the model, proposing that there arecharacteristics of the employee behavior that directly affect the intermedi-ate constructs; that is, we propose there are specific characteristics of a sit-uation that independently affect judgments, regardless of the particularcharacteristics of the person making the judgment.


P4

P1 P1

P5

P3 Interaction

P2 P4 P2

Characteristics of Employee Behavior (Situation)Act (Theft, Deceit)Actor (Voluntariness, Social Category )Person Affected (Social Category)Motivation (Enrichment, Revenge, Altruism )Consequences (Magnitude, Likelihood, Temporal Immediacy)

Stakeholder Characteristics (Person)Moral DevelopmentSocial CategoryPast Behavior, Experiences, and BeliefsInitial Image of Organization

Moral Judgment ofDishonesty

Locus of Blame

Stakeholder’s Image of theOrganization

Amount ofBlame

Attribution: Stability

Attribution: CauseAttribution: LocusAttribution: Control

Figure 1: A Model of Employee Dishonesty and Stakeholder’s Image of theOrganization

CHARACTERISTICS OF EMPLOYEEBEHAVIOR (PROPOSITION SET 1)

There are many components making up every situation involvingemployee behavior that might be construed as being dishonest. Else-where, we (1999) suggested five situational components as encompassingall of the situational concepts represented in the honesty literature. Thefirst is the act itself. For example, was the behavior theft or deceit, active orpassive, and so on? (see Scott & Jehn, 1999, for a more thorough descrip-tion of the typology). The second component is the actor. Did the actor actvoluntarily and responsibly? The third is the person affected. Is the personaffected by the action someone the evaluator values? The fourth compo-nent is the intention. What did the actor intend? And fifth is the result.What were the consequences (or what could one expect to be the conse-quences) of the action? Although we find the typology useful, we did notdevelop a model to predict behavior or attitudes based on these compo-nents, and other researchers who do develop models do not include all fiveof these components. We build on the five-component typology by delin-eating different aspects of each component and developing propositionslinking each to judgments of dishonesty and amounts of blame. In general,we propose that characteristics of the employee behavior in a situationwill affect judgments of dishonesty and amounts of blame (PropositionSet 1).

The Act

As Shaver (1985) suggested, defining “the event” is one of the first dif-ficulties judges have in trying to determine the cause of an event. The liter-ature generally recognizes two main categories of dishonesty: theft, whichinvolves taking the property of another, and deceit, which involves caus-ing someone to believe something one believes is untrue (Baier, 1993;Scott & Jehn, 1999; Sweetser, 1992). Each of these categories has twosubcategories, one more active (e.g., property theft, lying) and the othermore passive (e.g., production theft, concealing). Theft is broken intoproperty and production theft, as first proposed by Hollinger and Clark(1983) and empirically supported by Robinson and Bennett (1995).Deceit is divided into lying and concealing, in accordance with Bok(1978), as empirically supported by Elm and Teplensky (1998).

The identification of two different types of dishonesty naturally leadsto the question of whether one will be viewed more negatively than theother. Is theft worse than deceit or is deceit worse than theft? Because it is


easier to attribute blame for action than inaction (Chisholm & Feehan,1977; Ekman, 1992; Jones & Ryan, 1997; Spranca, Minsk, & Baron,1991; Sweetser, 1992), we argue that those acts that by nature require theactor to be more active will cause more severe judgments of dishonesty,and therefore, larger amounts of blame. We suggest that a judge will eval-uate a situation involving an employee who actively approaches a cus-tomer falsely claiming that the product is made in the United States asmore dishonest (and therefore, more blameworthy) as opposed to a situa-tion involving an employee who passively fails to mention that the productis made elsewhere, knowing that this information would be likely tochange the customer’s purchase decision. Specifically, we suggest the fol-lowing proposition:

Proposition 1a: More active acts will have more negative effects on judgmentsof dishonesty and larger amounts of blame than will more passive acts.

The Actor: Voluntariness and Social Category

The determination that an actor voluntarily caused an event is critical tomoral judgments as to whether a particular act constitutes dishonesty.According to Frankena (1973), moral systems are often universalized,such that the identity of the person engaging in the act is irrelevant. How-ever, there are characteristics of the actor or the actor’s situation that affectthe amount of blame attributed by the judge—voluntariness and socialcategory (Backman, 1976; Shaver, 1985).2

Even though an action must be undertaken voluntarily to fit the defini-tion of dishonesty, it is hard to conceive of truly “involuntary” speech orconcealment. Perhaps someone suffering from Tourette syndrome mightmake involuntary utterances, or someone with laryngitis might be unableto voice the truth, but by and large, people are physically free to speak ornot speak words they themselves choose. However, there are also degreesof freedom or coercion people have that make actions more or less repre-hensible. We propose that the more voluntary the action appears to be, themore severe the judge’s determination of dishonesty will be and the largerthe amount of blame. An actor who freely chooses to withhold informa-tion relevant to a customer’s purchase decision will be judged as more dis-honest and will suffer more blame than an actor who is constrained bylegal or ethical rules prohibiting disclosure. Similarly, a bank teller who isforced at gunpoint to collect rings, watches, and wallets from customersunfortunate enough to be present during a robbery will be seen more posi-tively than another teller who shortchanges customers or embezzles fromtheir accounts. Therefore, we propose:


Proposition 1b: Acts perceived to be more voluntary will have more negativeeffects on judgments of dishonesty and larger amounts of blame than willacts perceived to be more involuntary.

Some actors, by virtue of their social category, are not held accountablefor their actions (Backman, 1985; Bok, 1978). Children, for example,often are not expected to understand the moral content of their actions.And people in certain occupations (e.g., clergy) are held to different stan-dards (Backman, 1976; Barnes, 1994). By definition, professionals sub-scribe to a code of ethics of their profession. In an organizational context,we suggest that higher level personnel and professional personnel will beexpected to have higher standards, and therefore, acts of dishonesty ontheir part will result in harsher judgments and greater amounts of blame.The mailroom staff of Enron who distributed reports misrepresenting thecompany’s debt will be perceived as less dishonest and blamed less thanthe higher level professional accountants who drafted the reports. Even ifboth parties knew that the reports were false and hoped that their Enronstock would become more valuable as a result of the distribution of thereports, this is still the case. Similarly, we would expect instances whererank-and-file professional accountants at Arthur Andersen failed to reportaccounting abnormalities to be judged more dishonest and more blame-worthy than instances where Firestone Tire salespeople failed to reporthigh return rates for tires installed on Ford Explorers.

Proposition 1c: Actions perceived as undertaken by persons higher in the orga-nization or by professionals will have more negative effects on judgmentsof dishonesty and larger amounts of blame than will actions perceived asundertaken by rank-and-file employees.

The Person Affected

Although utilitarian moral philosophy suggests that we should reactequally to harm regardless of the identity of the victim, there is still a ten-dency to evaluate behavior more severely if it harms certain people. At thevery least, the person affected must be someone we believe can beoffended by the act.3 For example, Brenkert (1998) argued that marketershave a special obligation toward “the vulnerable” that they do not havetoward “normal” customers, and Collins (1989) proposed that harmswould be evaluated on the basis of the social class of the person harmed.Our proposition suggests that if a bus dispatcher lies to a customer, sayingthat the bus has departed when in fact it could be held long enough for thecustomer to board, the behavior will be judged to be more dishonest and


more blameworthy if the customer is a frail, elderly woman than if the cus-tomer is a strong, young man.

The excuse-making literature suggests that people often try to excusetheir behaviors by denying that anyone was hurt by their actions (Sykes &Matza, 1957). Certain victims, by virtue of previous actions they havetaken, are sometimes deemed to have given up their right to claim redressagainst harm. Victims who have been labeled as liars, murderers, orthieves are often deemed less deserving of the truth than are others whohave not been so labeled (Backman, 1976; Bok, 1978; Sykes & Matza,1957). Bonhoeffer (1955) suggested that the very definition of telling thetruth depends on whether the hearer deserves the truth. We suggest thatdishonesty that harms people seen as vulnerable or innocent, such as chil-dren or the elderly, will be judged more harshly than dishonesty harmingpeople who are not seen as vulnerable, such as competitors or people whoare seen as guilty, such as shoplifters or corporate spies. In light of this, weoffer the following proposition:

Proposition 1d: Acts harming someone who is perceived as being more vulner-able or innocent will have more negative effects on judgments of dishonestyand larger amounts of blame than acts harming persons who are perceivedas less vulnerable or less innocent.

The Intent

Definitions of dishonesty require that the actor intends the action to bedishonest (Barnes, 1994; Chisholm & Feehan, 1977), so we are excludingactions viewed by stakeholders as “honest mistakes” from our model.4

However, there are many reasons that can motivate intentionally deceptivebehavior, and we suggest that people judge acts of dishonesty differentlybased on those perceived motivations.

Research on theft, for instance, suggests that its motivation may bephysical enrichment, social enrichment, or revenge. Physical enrichmententails theft for one’s own use, social enrichment entails theft for anotherperson (often a customer), and revenge entails using the theft to harm thecompany (Greenberg & Scott, 1996; Hollinger, Slora, & Terris, 1992).Robinson and Bennett (1997) found two different motivations for devi-ance, outrage and disparities in treatment. Barnes (1994) divided lies intocategories according to the actor’s intention, “benevolent” and “mali-cious,” suggesting that benevolent lies are not morally culpable. And Bok(1978) suggested that there are four reasons offered to justify lying: avoidharm, do good, fairness, and veracity. We summarize the motivations


identified in the aforementioned literature into three basic categories:revenge (outrage, disparities in treatment, maliciousness), personal gain(physical enrichment, social enrichment), and altruism (benevolence,avoidance of harm, doing good, fairness, veracity). Research suggests thatpeople judge those who set out to do harm more harshly from those whoset out to do good (revenge vs. altruism; Barnes, 1994; Maier & Lavrakas,1976) and also judge those more harshly who are self-serving than thosewho are altruistic (personal gain vs. altruism; Backbier, Hoogstraten, &Terwogt-Kouwenhoven, 1997). In the following example, we proposethat a lazy restaurant employee who tells a rude, overweight customer thatthere are no more french fries when there is actually one serving of frenchfries remaining, may be doing it to get back at the customer for a previousslight, to avoid having to make more french fries or to help the customerstick to a diet. Our proposition suggests that the first two motivations willhave more negative effects than the third on amounts of dishonesty andblame assessed, even though the result is the same in all three cases.Specifically,

Proposition 1e: The perceived motivation of revenge or the perceived motiva-tion of personal gain will have more negative effects on judgments of dis-honesty and larger amounts of blame than the perceived motivation ofaltruism.

The Consequence

Some utilitarians would contend that consequences are all that matterin determining whether an action is right. Jones’s (1991) measure of moralintensity considered harm important enough to examine three differentcharacteristics of the consequences: magnitude of consequences, proba-bility of effect, and temporal immediacy. Collins (1989) included sixaspects in his construct, nature of harm: intentionality, visibility, severity,repetitiveness, permanency, and verifiability. He differentiates amongthree types of harm: physical, economic, and psychological. Obviously,ethics researchers consider many different aspects of an act’s consequenceto be important to decisions about the act. Psychology and organizationalbehavior research have shown that the effect of the lie is associated withjudges’ assessments of reprehensibility (Maier & Lavrakas, 1976;Shapiro, 1991), and that people are more likely to lie in situations wherethey believe the truth will harm the object (DePaulo & Bell, 1996). Wesuggest that there are direct effects of supposed consequences, as well asinteraction effects, which consider whether the consequences harm orbenefit the person making the judgment. We believe the continuum


actually can range from helping the recipient to being very harmful to therecipient.

Because the actual harm may differ from the intended or envisionedharm, we have developed two separate propositions. The first addressesthe actual harm. It is based on the findings from attribution theory, sug-gesting that when consequences are more severe, there is a greater ten-dency to allocate responsibility even when everything else about the situa-tion is the same (Kelley, 1967). This proposition (P1f) suggests that thecoat-check employee who steals a coat when it has car keys and a cellularphone in the pocket will have a more negative effect on the owner’s assess-ment of dishonesty and amount of blame than in the situation in which thecoat-check employee steals the same coat when the pockets are empty.The second harm-related proposition (P1g) addresses potential harm. It isbased on the fact that individuals have different perceptions of what couldhave happened if circumstances had been only slightly different. Thisproposition suggests that the car mechanic who assures the car’s ownerthat the brakes have been fixed when they haven’t will have a more nega-tive effect on the owner’s assessment of dishonesty and the amount ofblame than will the car mechanic who says that the radio has been fixedwhen it has not. Therefore:

Proposition 1f: Acts perceived as having greater harm will have more negativeeffects on judgments of dishonesty and larger amounts of blame than actsperceived as having lesser harm.

Proposition 1g: Acts perceived as having greater potential to harm will havemore negative effects on judgments of dishonesty and larger amounts ofblame than acts perceived as having less potential to harm.

In this section, we predicted that the characteristics of the situation havedirect effects on the moral judgment that an employee behaved dishon-estly and on amounts of blame. However, we also expect the characteris-tics of the stakeholder, in the role of judge, to affect his or her judgments,and we theorize about this in the following section, further delineating themodel and relationships presented in Figure 1.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE STAKEHOLDEROR JUDGE (PROPOSITION SET 2)

Models of individual moral decision making frequently rely on Rest’s(1986) four-part model that suggested that moral behavior is a function ofrecognizing a moral issue, using moral reasoning processes about thatissue, and forming an intention to act in accordance with one’s moral


reasoning. We focus on the second part, the judgment made through rea-soning about an issue. Not all moral judges view the same situations in thesame manner (Maier & Lavrakas, 1976; Marshall & Philip, 1997;Murphy, 1993; Shapiro, Treviño, & Victor, 1995). We suggest that indi-vidual differences will affect the moral decision-making process bychanging the weights people assign to different situational components,the amount of blame assigned, or the locus of blame. Past work holds con-stant many individual differences among judges, by modeling judgmentsby only one type of stakeholder group at a time. For example, Treviño’s(1986) person-situation model took the perspectives of actors, whereasWeber’s (1996) model took the perspective of impartial observers. Ourmodel includes all kinds of stakeholders and, thus, considers the effects ofa variety of individual differences. First, we will discuss the direct effectsof individuals’ characteristics on their judgments. Then, we will discusshow individuals’ characteristics interact with situations. In general, wepropose that characteristics of the judge will affect their judgment of dis-honesty and the amount of blame (Proposition Set 2).

One’s level of moral development and one’s social category are twocharacteristics of individuals that have been shown to have direct effectson moral judgment (Colby, Kohlberg, Gibbs, & Lieberman, 1983; Miller& Bersoff, 1992). Level of moral development is a construct that describeshow people develop more sophisticated understandings of morality asthey mature (Kohlberg, 1976). This construct places the concern for jus-tice for all people, regardless of their social background, at the highestlevel (Lickona, 1976). Therefore, we suggest that people who have higherlevels of moral development are less likely to consider the social categoryof the actor or person affected. That is, they are less likely to decide that itis acceptable to harm people in certain social categories than it is to harmpeople at lower levels of moral development. Similarly, they are less likelyto believe that people from certain social categories can be excused fortheir behavior. We offer the following proposition:

Proposition 2a: Judges with high levels of moral development will weigh thesocial category of the actor and the social category of the person affectedless heavily in their judgments of dishonesty than people will with lowerlevels of moral development.

Evidence also shows that past experiences, behaviors, and beliefs of indi-viduals cause them to judge situations differently. In general, we proposethat people who live their own lives within moral codes are harsher in theirjudgments of others than people are who do not. By “moral code,” wemean beliefs about what is moral and immoral behavior. There is not


much past work to provide the mechanisms by which this occurs, thoughthere is evidence that it does occur (Maier & Lavrakas, 1976). For exam-ple, people who believe that sex outside of marriage or eating non-Kosherfood is morally wrong, yet who have engaged in these behaviors, judgeothers’ transgressions less harshly than do those who share the samebeliefs but have not engaged in the behaviors. These relationships holdeven if the others’transgressions are of other parts of a moral code, such asprohibitions against lying or stealing, rather than the area where the per-son making the judgment has transgressed. We propose that people whoadhere to moral codes may misjudge how difficult compliance is foranother person who has become habituated to violating moral codes. Inaddition, causality also can run in the opposite direction; that is, peoplewho make harsh judgments about behavior are less likely to engage in it. Athird mechanism we propose is that people who do not live their liveswithin their own moral codes are driving the distinction. They may want tofeel better about themselves, so they judge others less harshly (Batson,Bowers, Leonard, & Smith, 2000). Based on these mechanisms, we sug-gest the following proposition:

Proposition 2b: Individuals whose past behavior has complied with their moralcodes will be harsher in their judgments of dishonesty and assess higheramounts of blame than will individuals whose behavior has frequentlystrayed from their moral codes.

In the following section, we discuss the interaction effects of the situationand the judge on judgments of dishonesty and amounts of blame (Proposi-tion Set 3). Then, we turn to developing Proposition Set 4, which refers tothe effects of the characteristics of the employee behavior and characteris-tics of the judge on another dependent variable, locus of blame.

INTERACTIONS OF CHARACTERISTICSOF EMPLOYEE BEHAVIOR AND THE JUDGEON JUDGMENTS OF DISHONESTY ANDAMOUNTS OF BLAME (PROPOSITION SET 3)

Even though the characteristics of the judge have some direct effects, itis in interaction with the situation that they are most interesting and pre-dictive, thus allowing a more fully specified model of moral judgments ofdishonesty and blame, and therefore of stakeholders’ image formation.The old adage,“It depends on whose ox is gored,” reflects just one waythat judgments are affected by how a particular judge interacts with


particular situational characteristics (in the instance of this adage, the per-son affected). In addition to the separate main effects we previouslydescribed in Proposition Sets 1 and 2, we also argue that there will beinteraction effects. Specifically, we argue that there will be interactions ofthe characteristics of the judge with the act, with the actor, and with theperson affected. Each is discussed in turn, but in general, we propose thatcharacteristics of the employee behavior will interact with characteristicsof the judge to affect judgments of dishonesty and amounts of blame(Proposition Set 3).

Judge With Act

Blasi (1980) suggested that the nature of a task might evoke individualdifferences among judges as to whether particular acts are dishonest. Hesuggested that this is the reason why much empirical research finds a dif-ference between what subjects believe to be moral and how they act: theysimply define their acts differently. Scott (2000) suggested that moral val-ues are idiosyncratic understandings of situations. She provided an orga-nizational example of individuals who are exceedingly careful not to usean organization’s supplies or equipment for personal reasons but whohave no compunctions about using its services or staff for personal rea-sons—whereas others see both behaviors as theft. Although little isknown or has been postulated about how these individual differencesoperate, we suggest that judges’ past personal behavior will influencetheir evaluation of the act. Specifically, we propose that judges will bemore lenient in their assessments of behaviors they themselves haveengaged in. This is different from Proposition 2b, which says that judgeswill be more lenient if they frequently violate their moral codes, regardlessof whether their violation is the same as the violation being judged. Herewe suggest that the judges must have engaged in the particular behavior,but it need not be a violation of their own code. So, someone who inflatedfigures on expense reports would judge another person who did so lessharshly. This may be because the person did not view the act as wrong.(One of the authors once had a boss who encouraged subordinates to claimnonexistent expenses to make up for caps on reimbursement of actualexpenses. His logic was that they deserved to be fully compensated fortheir travel.) Or it may be because the person feared that judging another’saction as wrong would call attention to his or her own wrongdoing. There-fore, we would expect interaction effects consistent with the followingproposition:


Proposition 3a: There will be an interaction between the judge’s previousbehavior and the act such that judges who have previously engaged in theact will be less harsh than judges who have not previously engaged in the actin their judgments of dishonesty and in the amount of blame they assess.They will be similar to other judges on acts they have not engaged in.

We believe the social category of the judge also interacts with the act toaffect their moral judgment. There is empirical evidence that people fromdifferent national cultures emphasize different acts (Miller & Bersoff,1992; Wartick, 1995). The evidence is mixed as to whether different gen-ders focus on justice or care (Derry, 1989; DesAutels, 1996; Gilligan,1982; Rothbart, Hanley, & Albert, 1986). It is entirely possible that otherdifferences may be found between people of different economic or reli-gious groups as well (Andre, 1995). Therefore, in this proposition weinclude a broad view of social groupings of people, including such thingsas national origin, race, gender, class, age cohort, and religion, under theheading social category.5

Proposition 3b: Individuals who are from social categories that emphasizehonesty will weigh the act more heavily in their judgments of dishonestythan people will from social categories that do not.

Judge With Actor

The evidence is clear that people judge situations differently when theyare the actors than when they are the objects or neutral observers (Brief,Dukerich, & Doran, 1991; du Boulay, 1974; Jones & Nisbett, 1972; Pitts,Wong, & Whalen, 1991). Actions that seem reasonable and necessary toan actor may seem morally bankrupt to an outside observer. We proposethat the distance, or proximity6 (physical, social, psychological, or eco-nomic) between the judge and the actor may affect the harshness of thejudge’s evaluation. Some empirical evidence from other research areas inorganizational behavior and communications support our assumptions.For instance, similarity-attraction theory suggests that people areattracted to others who are similar to them (Byrne, 1971). Social psychol-ogy research shows that people are more persuaded by the speech of peo-ple they perceive to be like them (Brock, 1972), and Lincoln and Miller(1979) showed that similarity between individuals might lead to more fre-quent communication. Byrne’s (1971) theory also suggested that individ-uals tend to apply negative assumptions to those with whom they are dis-similar. We suggest, therefore, that the social category of the judge will


interact with the social category of the actor as described in the followingproposition:

Proposition 3c: People who perceive themselves as being closer to the actor(physically, socially, psychologically, or economically) will be morelenient in their judgments of dishonesty and will assess less blame than peo-ple will who perceive themselves as being distant from the actor.

Judge With Person Affected

The last proposition compared the judge with the actor (i.e., thedeceiver), and here we examine the comparison of the judge with the per-son affected and propose that the closeness of the person affected to thejudge affects the judge’s perception of the blameworthiness of an action.According to Aristotle (1952), “It is a more terrible thing to defraud acomrade than a fellow-citizen, more terrible not to help a brother than astranger.” Utilitarians disagree, arguing that one individual’s pain is nomore or less important than another’s (Parfit, 1984; Smart & Williams,1991), although Messick (1998) argued that in-group favoritism has thebenefit of promoting altruism. Gene Talmadge, former governor of Geor-gia, was reelected on the slogan, “I stole, but I stole for you!” (Anderson,1975).

This concept of the closeness of the person affected to the judge is simi-lar to Jones’s (1991) notion of “proximity,” one of the components of the“moral intensity” of an issue: “The proximity of the moral issue is the feel-ing of nearness (social, cultural, psychological, or physical) that the moralagent has for victims (beneficiaries) of the evil (beneficial) act in ques-tion.” As Jones noted, Milgram’s experiments bore out this view by show-ing that people were less likely to harm people physically near to them(Milgram, 1974).

Applying these preferences to the organizational sphere suggests thatjudges will use closeness (physical, cultural, social, or psychological) ofthe person affected in evaluating the act. Empirical research suggests thatconsumers are more likely to see an action as unethical if it affects themdirectly (Pitts et al., 1991; Shapiro, 1991) and that they are more likely torespond negatively if the victim is also a consumer (Creyer & Ross, 1994)or a friend of theirs (Singer & Singer, 1997). We do not expect these reac-tions to be limited to consumers. If the person affected and the judge areboth suppliers or supervisors or stockholders, we expect the same kind ofinteraction effect to occur. Similarly, if the person affected is a friend ofthe person making the judgment, we expect that judge to be harsher and


assess more blame regardless of the role the judge plays in the situation.Therefore, we suggest the following proposition:

Proposition 3d: Judges who perceive the person affected as being closer tothemselves (physically, socially, psychologically, or economically) will bemore harsh in their judgments of dishonesty and will assess more blamethan if the person affected is perceived as being more distant to themselves.

This proposition is different from Proposition 1f (acts perceived as havinggreater harm will have more negative effects on judgments of dishonestyand larger amounts of blame than acts perceived as having lesser harm) inthat it takes the judge’s perspective on the harm in relation to the closenessof the person affected. Proposition 1f assumes a neutral perspective suchthat the death of a person is a greater degree of harm than a broken finger-nail. Proposition 3d suggests that it matters whose death and whose fin-gernail as relative to the similarity to the judge, as evidenced in the eulogyfor a Jewish man who killed 40 Palestinians at worship and was subse-quently beaten to death: “One million Arabs is not worth a Jewish finger-nail” (New York Times, February 28, 1994; cf. Baron, 1996).

Theories of moral judgment describe how stakeholders determinewhether acts constitute dishonesty, how bad the acts are, and how muchblame should accrue. However, it is attribution theory that suggestswhether the blame should accrue to the organization, which is what wediscuss in the following sections.

LOCUS OF BLAME AND ATTRIBUTIONTHEORY (PROPOSITION SET 4)

Once a moral judgment is made that an act is dishonest and that someamount of blame should be placed somewhere, our model (Figure 1) sug-gests that stakeholders decide where the blame should be placed (locus ofblame). We use attribution theory (which shows how blame is assigned toindividuals) to suggest how blame may be assigned to organizations aswell.

Assignment of Blame to Individuals

There is a rich literature as to how individuals are assigned blame fortheir actions. In general, the person assigning the blame judges whetherthe individual in question voluntarily caused a harmful event (Shaver,1985). Degrees of blame correspond to degrees of harm, degrees of


causality, and degrees of voluntariness, though not necessarily in a com-pletely rational manner (Miller, Turnbull, & McFarland, 1990). The per-son assigning blame often uses situational data to attribute motivation andvolition to the actor, as well as to define the event (Douglas, 1970; Heider,1958; Shaver, 1985). For example, a supervisor might notice anemployee’s pattern of calling in sick on summer Fridays and conclude thatthe employee was intentionally lying to beat the weekend traffic to thelake. The supervisor attributes motivation based on things the supervisorknows about the situation, such as that the employee has a lake house andthat traffic to the lake on Friday evenings is especially bad.

Assignment of Blame to Organizations

Bell and Tetlock (1989) developed a complex model describing howblame is attributed to individuals within organizations, but we have notfound models describing how organizations are assigned blame for theactions of their employees. We suggest that organizations are assignedblame for the actions of their employees when the cause of a harmfulemployee action is attributed to the organizations.

As previously noted, attribution theory suggests that people determinecausality for unexpected events by considering stability, locus, and con-trollability (Weiner, 1986). It suggests that stable, internal, and controlla-ble causes lead judges to blame individuals. Although the literature doesnot address this, we argue that these dimensions apply to organizations aswell. Therefore, we suggest that behavior that is unstable, external to theorganization, and uncontrollable by the organization would in the extremenot result in blame to the organization, even if it caused harm. However,we do not argue that organizations are any more immune than individualsfrom judges’ misperceptions of controllability—airlines are as likely asweather forecasters to be blamed for weather they cannot actually control.Following, we discuss how each of these dimensions is understood in theattribution literature and how we suggest it would apply in the organiza-tional context. In general, we propose that characteristics of employeebehavior and characteristics of the judge will affect locus of blame (Prop-osition Set 4).

Stability

Stability represents the likelihood that the same cause of an event oroutcome was the cause each and every time of that event or outcome.7

Thus, at an individual level, poor performance on a job task because of


lack of ability is a stable cause, whereas poor performance because of lackof effort is an unstable cause. Kelley (1967) suggested that observersattribute causality to individuals when they note that the same resultoccurs repeatedly when the same individual is involved. We argue that thiscan be applied at an organizational level as well. If an individual observesthe same behavior in repeated interactions with an organization’s manyemployees, we propose that the individual judge is likely to conclude thatthe behavior is stable, caused by the organization, and not by some person-ality quirk of one employee. A person who flies frequently and is oftentold by employees of one airline that delays were due to weather evenwhen there is no evidence of bad weather will be likely to conclude that theairline’s policy is to lie about the causes of delays.

There are individual differences among judges related to their pastexperiences with a particular organization that will influence these per-ceptions and their ultimate effects. When the judge has had previous expe-riences with the same organization during which the judge perceived dis-honesty, the judge is more likely to attribute subsequently perceiveddishonesty to the organization. On the other hand, when the judge has hadnumerous experiences with the organization in the past during which therewere no instances of dishonesty, the judge will be less likely to attribute aninstance of dishonesty to the organization. However, if the judge has noexperiences with the organization and bases the initial image of the orga-nization on some other factor, an experience that is different from theexpected one will have a strong effect on the judge’s image of theorganization.

Proposition 4a: The locus of blame will vary with the extent and nature of thejudge’s past experience, including the image of the organization as held bythe judge before the act of dishonesty occurred, such that judges who per-ceive the organization as a stable cause of the employee’s behavior willblame the organization more than judges will whose past experience pre-cludes such a perception.

There are also individual differences among actors that might lead them tobe more or less likely to perform dishonest acts: self-monitoring(Caldwell & O’Reilly, 1982), moral development (Grover, 1993), intelli-gence (Blasi, 1980), locus of control (Grover, 1993), Machiavellianism(Giacalone & Knouse, 1990; Ross & Robertson, 2000), work ethic(Eisenberger & Shank, 1985), and conscientiousness (Murphy & Lee,1994) to name a few. Insofar as stakeholders perceive employees to pos-sess these characteristics and see these characteristics as stable and there-fore likely to cause dishonest acts in the future, they may hold


organizations accountable for hiring and retaining employees with thesecharacteristics. It has been suggested that organizations with climates orcultures of dishonesty may have more frequent instances of dishonestbehavior due to their hiring and socialization practices (Cherrington &Cherrington, 1985; Kamp & Brooks, 1991; Ross & Robertson, 2000; Vic-tor & Cullen, 1988). We suggest that stakeholders may hold organizationsaccountable for outcomes of organizational practices such as hiring andsocialization that encourage the prevalence of certain employee character-istics and will assign the locus of blame to the organization.

Proposition 4b: More of the locus of blame will be assigned to the organizationwhen the stakeholders perceive the causes of dishonest behavior to be sta-ble employee characteristics that were known by the employer.

Locus

Locus represents the location attributed to the cause of the action. Inour model, the internal locus is within the person being judged; the exter-nal locus is outside of the person being judged. Therefore, conflictingdirections from supervisors would be external to the task-performer beingjudged, whereas lack of knowledge would be internal to the individualbeing judged. This dimension of individual-level attribution theory is dif-ficult to translate into mesolevel theory because we do not have compre-hensive theories yet that provide clear ideas of what is “inside” and “out-side” an organization. One possible approach is Pfeffer and Baron’s(1988) examination of three possible ways of moving employees towardthe outside of the organization: location of employment (distant from themain office), duration of employment (time-limited), and amount ofadministrative control (not able to direct others’ work). The closer theactor is to the inside of the organization, we argue, the more likely thebehavior is to be seen as having been done “by the organization.” “Inside”may be someone high in the hierarchy, someone who works in the mainoffice, or someone with a permanent job. “Outside” may be someone lowin the hierarchy, someone who works in a branch location, or someonewith a temporary job.

There are some individuals, usually top management personnel, whoare more closely associated with a stakeholder’s image of the organiza-tion, whose actions are thus likely to be more closely associated with thestakeholder’s image of the organization as well (Higgins & Snyder, 1989;Scott & Lane, 2000; Sutton & Callahan, 1987). We suggest that higherlevel personnel will be more likely to be seen as representing the organiza-tion and that therefore the locus of blame will be with the organization.


This is different from Proposition 1c, which refers to the effect of a per-son’s place in the hierarchy on whether the act is seen as being dishonestand how bad the act is seen to be. With this proposition, we are discussingwhere the blame is placed. It may be that a professional employee (e.g., apsychologist) is judged more harshly for falsifying market research databecause the judge expects a professional to adhere to a higher standard ofconduct, but the judge does not place much blame on the organization forthe psychologist’s behavior because the psychologist is relatively low inthe organizational hierarchy.

Proposition 4c: More of the locus of blame will be assigned to the organizationwhen actions are perceived as being done by persons higher in the organiza-tion than when actions are perceived as being done by rank-and-fileemployees.

Controllability

Controllability represents whether the person engaging in the actioncould have done otherwise. For example, a lawn maintenance worker whofrequently stopped work to sneeze during allergy season will be seen ashaving less control over low productivity than a coworker who frequentlystopped work to dig for fishing worms. Organizational control of theactions of employees has been described by Simon (1976, p. 133) asoccurring within an “area of acceptance,” where employees relinquishtheir decision-making rights to their organizations. We suggest that attri-bution theory can be applied to the organization-level phenomenon oforganizational blame when the person making the attribution believes thatthe behavior in question can be controlled by organizational policy orsupervision. In attribution theory, at the individual level, controllability isa hypothetical view as to whether the organization could control thebehavior if it wanted to, whereas locus is the assessment of whether theorganization actually did control the behavior in a given case. At the orga-nizational level, this becomes more complicated, because it is very diffi-cult for judges to know what an organization can or does control.

Earlier, we argued that more voluntary acts would cause more severejudgments of dishonesty, and therefore, larger amounts of blame. Attribu-tion theory would suggest that even if there were more blame, the locuswould not be the organization but the actor acting voluntarily, because theactor would be seen as having more involvement. Although an action mustbe undertaken voluntarily to fit the definition of dishonesty, there are alsodegrees of voluntariness that make actions more or less reprehensible.Jones and Ryan (1997) argued that the extent of organizational pressure to


act unethically is one of the factors considered in determining the moraldisapprobation that accrues to individuals. We argue that the extent ofpressure to act unethically acts in the reverse for assessments of moral dis-approbation at the organizational level. The same organizational pressurethat excuses individuals from blame places more blame with the organiza-tion. As attribution theory suggests, “controllability” is important indetermining causality. If the organization “makes” its employees engagein dishonest acts, the locus of blame will be with the organization.

In Proposition 1b, we distinguished between an actor who freelychooses to withhold information relevant to a customer’s purchase deci-sion and an actor who is constrained by legal or ethical rules prohibitingdisclosure. Similarly, we distinguished between a bank teller who isforced at gunpoint to collect rings, watches, and wallets from customerspresent during a robbery, and a teller who shortchanges customers orembezzles from their accounts. This proposition envisions a third case—the actor who is required by company training or coerced by companyincentive systems to withhold information or the bank employee who isrequired by orders from superiors to charge customers fees that were notproperly disclosed to them. Our next proposition suggests that these caseswill result in the judge’s finding the locus of blame at the organizationlevel rather than the individual actor level.

Based on this, we propose that the more voluntary the action appears tobe on the part of the employee, the less will the judge attribute the locus ofblame to the organization. That is, we believe the stakeholder’s image ofthe organization will suffer more when the judges believe that the organi-zation has required employees to behave deceptively than when judgesbelieve that employees are acting on their own.

Proposition 4d: Acts perceived as being more voluntary on the part of employ-ees will have less negative effects on the organization as locus of blame thanwill acts perceived as being coerced by the organization.

As is demonstrated by the final proposition, the locus of blame moderatesthe effects of the amount of blame on image. If the locus of blame is not theorganization, then, regardless of the amount of blame, we predict no effecton the stakeholder’s image of the organization. On the other hand, as soonas the judge determines that the organization is at least partially where theblame should lie, the amount of blame has a negative effect on the imageof the organization held by the stakeholder. Therefore (see Figure 1):

Proposition 5: The effect of amount of blame on stakeholder’s image of theorganization is moderated by the locus of blame such that no effect will


occur when the locus is not the organization, and more negative effects onthe stakeholder’s image of the organization will occur as the proportion ofthe locus of blame for the organization rises.

This stakeholder’s image of the organization feeds back to the individualstakeholder’s initial image of the organization and, if it is shared with oth-ers, also becomes part of the organizational reputation (see Figure 1, feed-back loop). We note this as an important final note in the model as ourexperience in conducting empirical research on dishonesty in organiza-tions suggests that the likelihood that the stakeholder’s image of the orga-nization will be communicated to others is greater for instances of dishon-esty (and perhaps all negative experiences) than it is for instances ofhonesty or other positive experiences.

CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE MODEL

We see three basic contributions of this model to the literature. First, itpresents a person-situation model of moral judgment that is not limited toactors or victims, to employees, customers, stockholders, suppliers, orcompetitors. By modeling the moral judgment of a broader range of stake-holders, this model combines streams of research that are obviously inter-related but have been discussed and modeled separately. Previous modelshave assumed the perspectives of actors (e.g., Treviño, 1986), perspec-tives of coworkers (e.g., Victor, Treviño, & Shapiro, 1993), perspectivesof impartial observers (e.g., Weber, 1996), perspectives of victims (e.g.,Shapiro, 1991), or perspectives of other types of stakeholders, but eachprevious model attempts to isolate the variables related to a particular per-spective. Even though we believe that these models have been helpful inbuilding theory, we pull together common themes in these models to pre-dict how most stakeholders will make a judgment. Our model, thoughmore complex than any one of the other models, is more parsimonious, webelieve, than identifying which model applies to the particular situationunder consideration. In addition, by recognizing multiple stakeholders(with different “stakes”) involved in the same event, we reduce the possi-bility of drawing erroneous conclusions. For example, a model that con-sidered only the supervisor’s perspective might find certain kinds ofuntruthful statements to be not only acceptable, but even desirable,whereas the same statements seen from an employee’s perspective mightbe emotional labor, causing undesirable employee burnout. Similarly,models that address only customers’ perceptions may rely heavily on thefact that customers do not have much information about the transaction,


ignoring that employees witnessing the event may formulate their ownimages of the organization and determine the organization not to be wor-thy of their talent or their honesty.

A second contribution of our model is that it describes the mechanismby which encounters with individual employees are transformed intostakeholders’ images of the organization. This recognizes the shift from amanufacturing, product-based system of image formation to a service,interpersonal encounter-based system of image formation. The mecha-nism is complex, because human beings are complex. And third, ourmodel describes the iterative process through which stakeholders’ imagesof organizations are shaped with each new encounter with employees.This emphasizes the fact that reputations undergo serial changes over time(Bromley, 1993).

RESEARCH DIRECTIONS

This model is presented to facilitate research and to allow researchersto compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges. We have alreadybegun to explore small segments of the model using vignettes that controlfor the possible variations in situation. Our experience has been that it isextremely difficult to construct vignettes that actually hold many of thedimensions constant, but we believe that without some framework such aswe offer here, it is difficult to understand the implications of much of theempirical work in the area.

Further work in theory development could explore how otheremployee behaviors besides dishonesty affect stakeholders’ images oforganizations and how the individual-level perceptions of organizationsmerge to form reputations. Are the mechanisms by which slow service orsloppy work affects image the same as the ones outlined in our model? Arethere opinion leaders whose perceptions stimulate others to see the sameimage?

Empirical research to test the model will help in further theory devel-opment and in practical applications. Theory will be advanced by effortsto operationalize the constructs identified in this model and by evidencethat confirms or disconfirms the relationships specified. Practitioners whoare interested in improving stakeholders’images of organizations by elim-inating or reducing dishonesty in their organizations will have a clearerunderstanding of the interaction of different components of the model,enabling them to identify which type of dishonesty in the organizationcauses the most severe negative effect on image held by the average


stakeholder of the organization. And individuals may benefit from under-standing how their own personal characteristics interact with situationalcharacteristics to affect their moral judgments or how they as organiza-tional employees may be judged.

Empirical tests of the model might include approaches that focus on themagnitude of the effects. For example, a researcher could test how muchof an effect increases in the magnitude of the consequences have on stake-holders’ images of the organization. Is there a strict linear relationshipsuch that more harm causes worse image? Or are there amounts of harmabove or below which effects on image are constant? Likewise, research-ers could test how much of an effect having the same social category of theperson affected has on stakeholders’images of organizations. Informationsuch as this would be valuable to practitioners in identifying which typesof dishonesty should be most strongly discouraged.

Empirical tests of the model also might explore interactions not speci-fied in this article. There may be interactions between the person and situ-ation that we did not specify in the model. We have found no strong theo-retical or empirical evidence for other interactions (e.g., the judge’sMachiavellianism and the act’s motivation) affecting stakeholders’images of organizations, but later researchers could determine whetherthey do and elaborate on the current model. Although we did not discussthem, there may be also interactions within the situation or person (actwith result, Machiavellianism with locus of control) that have effects onstakeholders’ images of organizations.

This theory has implications for practitioners in different areas, evenfor practitioners who are committed to some form of dishonesty in theirrelationships with the public. Strategy practitioners might seek differentniches if they knew which potential customers would be less likely to per-ceive their behavior as dishonest. Human resources practitioners mightchange selection requirements for market-research positions to ensurethat deception deemed necessary to research does not affect the imagesstakeholders have of the organization. We are not interested in encourag-ing practitioners to lie, but we have come to recognize in our research thatwe, too, are “judges,” with our own interactions with situations. What wecall “emotional lies,” others may call “politeness.”

LIMITATIONS

Because of our effort to limit the complexity of the model, it does notaddress how stakeholders who are important to the organization discover


acts of dishonesty. We do know that individual differences among judgesaffect their ability to detect deceit (DePaulo, Lanier, & Davis, 1983;DePaulo, Stone, & Lassiter, 1985; Ekman, 1988). There are also certainsettings in which judges do not desire to detect deceit, generally when thespeaker is saying good things about the judge (Ekman, 1988), and certainorganizational settings in which deceit is harder to detect (e.g., boundary-spanners vs. supervisor-subordinate interactions; DePaulo, DePaulo,Tang, & Swaim, 1989). Finally, there are individual and organizationalefforts of impression management and public relations designed to createpositive images and reputations among influential stakeholders (Bromley,1993). A more complex model that included the likelihood that an act ofdishonesty would be discovered, that addressed impression-managementtechniques, and that varied the importance of the stakeholder’s opinion tothe organization would address this problem.

The model also does not address how honest accounts, apologies, andexcuse making may also mitigate the effects of blame to the organizationby repairing damage to stakeholders’ images of it (Benoit, 1995), nor dowe address how the organization becomes aware of the need for repair.Most people do not complain when they are dissatisfied, so an organiza-tion is not likely to know that an employee’s behavior has affected a stake-holder’s image of the organization. However, once an organization doesbecome aware, its subsequent behavior can do much to change (or rein-force) an image. A more complex model included the individual and orga-nizational characteristics that made complaints more likely, and accounts,excuses, and apologies more effective would address this problem.

Finally, the model addresses only perceptions of dishonesty, not anobjective measure of actual dishonesty. Although this is appropriate for amodel considering the effects of dishonesty on stakeholders’ images oforganizations, researchers interested in applying it to the effects of dis-honesty (especially theft) on profitability might be better served by con-sidering actual, rather than perceived, dishonesty.

CONCLUSION

This much I know, that even he who teaches that we ought to lie wants toappear to be teaching the truth.

—Augustine (1952)

We discuss multiple stakeholders in the same model, because webelieve that one of the problems associated with current ethical decision


making is that people take into account the viewpoint of only one stake-holder at a time. For example, when they take the supervisor’s viewpoint,researchers focus on employees’ lying to or stealing from the company.This ignores lying to customers in a way that benefits the company, suchas “business bluffing” or emotional labor. When one has customers whoare, in essence, paying for dishonesty by asking an accounting firm to filea deceptive audit report, a focus on the customer’s desires without consid-ering whether stockholders or government agencies would make the samepositive judgments about the act is myopic. Although individual modelsof customer reaction, stockholder reaction, or employee reaction mayeach be more parsimonious than our model, we offer our model as a way toencourage consideration of an action’s effect on more than one stake-holder’s image of the organization.

NOTES

1. We expressly exclude the natural environment, stakeholder groups, or other organiza-tions from the category “stakeholder” in our model because of the problems associated withpositing the existence of a “mind” of the environment, a group, or an organization.

2. There are many individual differences among actors that have been theorized orshown to increase the likelihood that they will lie, for example, self-monitoring (Caldwell &O’Reilly, 1982), intelligence (Blasi, 1980), Machiavellianism (Giacalone & Knouse, 1990;Ross & Robertson, 2000), work ethic (Eisenberger & Shank, 1985), and conscientiousness(Murphy & Lee, 1994). However, if we did not find evidence that judges will be less likely toblame them (or their employing organizations) because they have these characteristics, wedid not include the characteristics in our model.

3. We use the term person affected without meaning to exclude other living beings, orga-nizations, institutions, or the natural environment from those who may be affected by dishon-esty. However, we would argue that in general, harms to other human beings are “closer tous” than are harms to organizations or harms to other nonhuman life. See Collins (1989) for adiscussion of harms inflicted on “non-persons.”

4. We’re not suggesting that “honest mistakes” have no effect on stakeholders’ images oforganizations, just that the process by which they affect those images is different. We’re alsonot suggesting that stakeholders are perfect in their recognition of honest mistakes.

5. Although much work needs to be done to specify which social categories and why, webelieve that it is important to include this general proposition in the model regarding socialcategories, as most Western-developed theories of dishonesty and image ignore such cul-tural, national, or racial categories as relevant (Khera, 2001).

6. Our use of the term “proximity” differs from Jones’s (1991) construct in that we exam-ine the judge’s proximity to the actor as well as to the person affected (see Proposition 3d).Jones defined proximity solely in relation to the person affected.

7. This may be similar to Collins’s notion of “repetitiveness” of the harm, which suggeststhat if the same harm keeps occurring, it is worse than if the harm happens only once (Collins,1989).


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Elizabeth D. Scott received her Ph.D. from the Wharton School of the University ofPennsylvania. She is currently an associate professor of management in the De-partment of Business Administration at Eastern Connecticut State University. Shehas published research on moral values and dishonesty in organizations in Busi-ness & Society, Business Ethics Quarterly, Journal of Business Ethics, andTeaching Business Ethics. She can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].

Karen A. Jehn received her Ph.D. from Northwestern’s Kellogg Graduate Schoolof Management and is now a professor in the Management Department of theWharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. She has researched workplaceconflict in the United States and internationally, focusing on transnational teamsin joint ventures. Recently, she has been interested in two new topic areas relatedto organizational conflict: diversity and deviance. Dr. Jehn has published work in


Business & Society, Administrative Science Quarterly, International Journal ofConflict Management, Academy of Management Journal, and Journal of Organi-zational Behavior. She can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].


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